AFORETHOUGHT

The Mood

We weren't sacrificed. We hadn't even been heard. The voices carried on, but in a far off place. As if they had finally taken heed, and left him alone. It had been a long, cruel and disorientating journey. He didn't like where he was, or what had happened. He was disapointed in himself, and disappointed by everything. The mood had taken over. There weren't many ways to stop it. Catastrophe after catastrophe came beckoning. He thought back to people he had cared about, but they had disappeared in a mist. The cruelty of what they had done was up to them to discern. He didn't think they cared. He knew they didn't care. It was easy to laugh when you were in a comfortable space.

But these trials were tribulations he was not meant to bear. Things he was not meant to have seen. Ignominy he was not meant to have reached. He crawled under cupboards and found nothing but dust. "I used to think people were basically good, well intentioned, but I don't think that anymore. The last few years have bashed it out of me." 

There were silent streams. There was the each of a scream that had died down. There was embarrassment over everything. Two steps forward and one step back became one step forward and two steps back. Hard work wasn't enough, you had to be shrewd. But he wasn't shrewd. He was just dissembling into a place without a home. A dark force without a focus. An ache that never went away. He couldn't control his moods, he couldn't control anything. Lotto tickets were not an appropriate investment strategy. The city no longer welcomed him. Everyone knew of his mistakes. The propaganda machine had destroyed him. No good deed went unpunished. Psychopaths crawled through the rafters. He was disappointed beyond disappointment.

"Why couldn't they have just left him alone?"

"Not in their nature."

And so he washed from one remnant of an old life to another, and he held back what should have been tears. They weren't going to die today, that's all he knew. He was more alone than he had ever been; and none of it had been intentional. The laughter died down to a ruthful cry, a grimace at the stupidity of others. The madness of foreigners. He had painted the sky; and drowned.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Searing temperatures that have set new heat records in central Queensland are heading to the state’s southeast.

Four weather stations recorded their highest ever January temperatures on Thursday as a stagnant mass of hot air in central Australia continued to affect inland Queensland.

In the state’s northwest, Century Mine reached 44.5C and 45.6C in Camooweal, while further south temperatures at the Monument hit 45.5C, and 46C in Bedourie.

However, it was Birdsville residents in southwest Queensland who endured the hottest temperatures in Queensland when the mercury reached a scorching 48.1C at 4pm.

Forecasters say a trough coming from the west is pushing the hot air southeast, and Brisbane and surrounding districts will be affected in coming days.

The temperature in Brisbane is predicted to soar to 37 degrees on Friday and 41 on Saturday.

West of the capital, residents of Ipswich and Gatton are set to endure 43-degree heat on Saturday.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s Pradeep Singh said Queensland’s wet season was unusually late in arriving for the second year in a row.

‘‘Normally the monsoon starts affecting northern Australia around late December/January but it didn’t happen last year and it hasn’t happened this year, so the heat’s just been building up over inland parts of Australia,’’ he said.

Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/heatwave-pushes-mercury-to-new-highs-20140102-307zq.html#ixzz2pNDxoj8U

DISTORTED TRUTH

The Death of Local Shops Australia

There were a thousand things that came from nowhere, difficult, small, resonances of things that had been. pasts that had been dwelt upon too much. Time that came curling around into small dark corners. Pasts. Faces. Loves that had disappeared. Moments which were barely created before they disappeared. Fragile. Bitter. An anger that could curl the tails off ants. A boy aughing as he squashed insects. An intelligence hiding. A truth gone. There came a point when it wasn't worth arguing. That the story told might as well be the story that survived, "because nothing will save the Governor General".

He was on the move, as he had been for years now. Other people created their lives. He destroyed his. There were times when an ancient colony would try and break through the walls. But he barely had the heart to hear them anymore. All had gone. Old friends had disappeared. Michael had left the country with little intention to return. He was saddened by familiar signposts that were disappearing. He had always wanted to come from a village, but there was no village. Not in this place of suburbs and closed doors and silent streets. Not in this place where he was old and no longer sought after. Where post and position had disappeared. 

Where the hallucinatory screach of summer cicadas was all that could be hoped for.

This place where he couldn't find the heart to move on.

THE BIGGER STORY:

To those listening closely enough, it might have sounded like a thinly-veiled threat.

As the royal commission into the first Rudd government's home insulation program began on Monday, its counsel assisting noted there was an ''armoury of coercive powers'' available to force reluctant witnesses to give evidence.

But Keith Wilson, QC, added he was hopeful such force would not be necessary.

It may have been the biggest clue yet that former prime minister Kevin Rudd and then environment minister Peter Garrett are due for a stint in the witness box, willingly or not.

Since the $25 million royal commission into the $2 billion-plus scheme was announced by the federal government last month, speculation has been rife about who would be called, but neither Commissioner Ian Hanger, QC, nor Mr Wilson would name any parties issued notices to appear.

The names on the list will not be publicly available until closer to the hearing dates, which are expected to be in March and April.

The royal commission can summon a witness to appear before it and there are very few grounds on which a person can refuse. Failure to comply could result in either a fine or imprisonment.

Mr Rudd launched the scheme in 2009 as a way of staving off the global financial crisis.

Three Queenslanders and one man from NSW were killed while installing insulation during the life of the program and many more were injured. Up to 220 house fires have been blamed on poorly trained installers operating while the scheme was in place and established insulation businesses suffered financial losses.

Mr Rudd apologised for the deaths in July this year, following findings from the Queensland state coroner that the rushed implementation of the program had contributed to the deaths of Matthew Fuller, 25, Rueben Barnes, 16, and Mitchell Sweeney, 22, between October 2009 and February 2010. Marcus Wilson, 22, was also killed.

The government has asked Commissioner Hanger to ''focus on how the actions of the [Rudd] Australian government may have contributed to those deaths, injuries and financial loss and damage to businesses''.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/signs-kevin-rudd-peter-garrett-may-be-called-before-insulation-inquiry-as-counsel-emphasises-its-powers-20131223-2zun0.html#ixzz2pHZFHonw

RECOVERY: THE HAUNTING PART TWO

The Death of The Local Shopping Centre, Australia

We were here and there, perplexed, with the coming of the Sales, with a distant cry. I have no faith but the faith in other people's kindness, an old friend said on Facebook, having had a friendly encounter with a US taxi driver. He had no such faith. He compared them to carion birds, ready to pick the flesh off anything that moved. They bolstered their own beliefs by a belief in others, but as the world swirled by, as they did their best to destroy anything and everything he did, he knew the dark soul, the treakle of disease and darkness through which they all waded. He knew there was no love in the heart of others. That all these barren moments led to an even darker, more dismissive moments. To a differnt hope: that it would all be over.

"The world is so beautiful," the Buddha is said to have exclaimed in his dying hours, but whether he had got there was a different question. He missed the world he should have been a part of. He lamented his own stupidity and mistakes. He pined for things that were already lost. It came through time and again, the thud, the thud. The swirling skies and the mismatched motives, assorted faces. He sought kindness where he could find it, and ignored the rest. For all was of a shadow, and he knew not where to go.

If it had been a slow suicide, that was over now. But he still coughed and slept abnormally; and his mind ran around in circles, regretting what had happened. Shame, guilt, regret, remorse, they came in thuds and were dismissed as useless emotions. Because emotions themselves were useless, leading to cringing solitiude and paths not travelled. To encounters ignored. Pasts gone haywire. 

Briefly, he couldn't find a way out. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/tony-abbott-kevin-rudd-julia-gillard-a-year-of-frantic-politics-20131227-2zzmj.html

The same December night General Motors signed the death warrant of Holden, one of Tony Abbott's most senior ministers went looking for love.

While thousands of auto workers began contemplating Christmas with a new uncertainty, the minister texted journalists: ''I got the tone right today, what do you think?''

Such needy egotism would barely be worth mentioning, were it not juxtaposed against the life-altering depth-charge that Holden's demise represents for many Australians.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari.

Contrary to Labor's characterisation, the car maker's closure was decided in Detroit, but like most everything else in the 2013 political year, it was also mired in our now deeply polarised politics.

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A new generation of Liberals was contemptuous of the heavily unionised auto industry and its co-dependent business model reliant on constant government assistance.

In the end, the new government's decision to hold its nerve and let the mainstay of Australia's postwar political-economy slip into history was as brave as it was cold.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari.

But in the short-term it just added to a growing sense for voters that they'd elected a kind of anti-government - one which stood more determinedly against things than for them.

It was against the minority parliament and everything it produced. It was against the carbon tax, the mining tax, the education funding model (until it wasn't), the national broadband network, climate science and, now, in power itself, it was even against the car industry.

The departure of Holden bookended a year that began with renewed hope for the ALP. Its faint pulse had strengthened from the middle of 2012, when the sky stubbornly refused to fall in with the commencement of the carbon price. Somewhat laughably, what was going to be a wrecking ball for the economy morphed into a slower but equally lethal python squeeze.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari.

The chasm between such imagery and the equanimity with which the carbon price was absorbed cost the opposition leader much of his personal standing. The result was an Indian summer for Julia Gillard, and it set up 2013 in new and interesting ways.

Despite a horror term, Gillard now eyed the possibility that, in the end, voters might baulk before installing Abbott if she could just give them enough reason to stick.

But her eagerness begat another classic error: the crazy-brave decision to open the political year on January 30 by setting the election for September 14.

Bold, imaginative, or just mad, the idea had several elements. First, she wanted to wrong-foot Abbott from the start of the election year. Second, she hoped to forestall any talk of a leadership change by placing her own party on an election footing. And third, she wanted to fence off some time to leverage the authority of office.

The focus would be on voters and on implementing long overdue reform in areas such as disability insurance, school funding and skills.

''It should be clear to all which are the days of governing and which are the days of campaigning,'' she told the National Press Club.

Yet it was Gillard herself who revealed, just three days later, a reshuffle forced by the departures of her attorney-general, Nicola Roxon, and Senate leader, Chris Evans. Immediately, Labor went straight back to talking about itself. And, of course, that meant demotions and bad blood - for which there would be a heavy price exacted.

The return to normal dysfunction brought to mind John Howard's cutting lament that voters had got just ''five minutes of economic sunshine'' out of Paul Keating before things had turned grey again.

Gillard's period of not-campaigning barely lasted that long, and was already being seen for the stunt it was when she embarked on an ill-conceived campaign swing into western Sydney.

According to a senior Labor figure, the week-long encampment at the Rooty Hill Novotel/RSL complex was always headed for disaster.

''The people in the outer west who, by the way, commute every day, thought it was stupid that the PM had to base herself there to get anything done, even though she has a Sydney residence,'' one exasperated MP said.

''It said it all. It was like declaring they lived in another country.''

And her reassurance that ''Westies'' were not ''second-class citizens'' had the perverse effect of suggesting that the government might actually think they were.

Such missteps kept coming, as did the fortnightly polls, which provided the grim countdown to Labor's inevitable demise.

As Fairfax Media's Tim Colebatch reported in June, the government's descent was being led by Gillard herself.

''A comparison of Fairfax/Nielsen polls in the 2010 campaign with those in the first half of 2013 shows Ms Gillard's net approval rating has slumped by a massive 33 percentage points,'' he wrote.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/tony-abbott-kevin-rudd-julia-gillard-a-year-of-frantic-politics-20131227-2zzmj.html#ixzz2pAxCZGmM

THE HAUNTING

Australia's Nanny State

He had deteriorated rapidly since returning to Australia. For one, he hadn't wanted to be there. He didn't have a job or a home there anymore, and floating from one location to the next was not his idea of fun. And two, the haunting hadn't stopped, it had just dissembled into finer forms. There was no compensation forthcoming, the thieves of Thailand's criminal milieu regarded it as entirely within their purlieu to rob tourists, to do as they do. And to haunt anyone who dared to object  But his own heart had gone now, in a swirl of depression. He couldn't keep going, having climbed one mountain too many; only to find another mountain behind. Or that's how it seemed some days. 

"I told you to watch him, not haunt him," a senior officer said. But perhaps his brain was only making sense out of nonsense; and he shrank and he shrank, trying to be invisible. Instead he watched first, all the six seasons of the Supranos, then After Earth, Frozen Ground, and was already half-way through the 4400. It hadn't been easy dealing with The Haunting from the very beginning, when they had surrounded his house, infested it with cameras, laughed at his every move, followed him everywhere. Ridiculed him at every opportunity. It hadn't been easy being back in a country where he did not want to be, in diminished circumstances, trying to make a project work. Just working and coping with the eternal ache; and the eternal surveillance.

They might have finally got the message, but it had been a long time coming. You could shred someone's heart and feed it to the masses. You could act in mobs and hunt to kill. You could be more base than he could ever possibly have imagined. And you could sing sick reason for the rest of your days; you die for sure, you die for sure. But if the haunting had gone on for ever, if they had pursued him from one place to another without any reason but vengeance,  he could be forgiven for wanting to forget. "They'll find him in the harbour one day, I suppose," they said, as if he was at fault, and the out of control Thai mafia could do as they liked. Did do as they liked.

He still wished he had never come across the story. He still wished things had never happened the way they had happened. He still missed his funny little place in the country and flogged himself for his own stupidity. But none of this was useful in forcing him to move on. Nor was the surveillance; sometimes minimal, never non-existent. He wanted to be free but they never let him. He wanted to face the world on his own terms but did not have the resources. He wanted to go to a place where he was not known and would never be known, but there was no such place. And so, instead, he retreated into a tiny room and pulled a sheet over his head. And let the world swirl by in its unrelenting way. No kindness goes unpunished, as the saying went.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/12/31/thousands-of-police-troops-tighten-security-in-russian-city-hit-by-2-suicide-bombings/

Vladimir Putin vows to obliterate ‘inhuman’ terrorists responsible for bombings ahead of Russian Olympics

Gary Peach, Associated Press | December 31, 2013 9:04 AM ET
More from Associated Press

AP Photo/Denis TyrinRussian soldiers patrol the Battle of Stalingrad memorial in Volgograd, Russia, Tuesday, Dec. 31, 2013. Russian authorities ordered police to beef up security at train stations and other facilities across the country after a suicide bomber killed 14 people on a bus Monday in the southern city of Volgograd. It was the second deadly attack in two days on the city that lies just 400 miles (650 kilometers) from the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

 
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HL:Thousands of police, troops tighten security in Russian city hit by 2 suicide bombings

Eerily empty buses lumbered through the streets, police weighed down with body armour warily watched pedestrians near a fast-food restaurant, and members of Cossack units stood guard at bus stops. Volgograd was an ominous and jittery city on Tuesday, after two suicide bombings in two days that killed 34 people.

We get a feeling that a war has started

“People are afraid it will happen again; they’re trying not to go outside if they don’t have to,” said 20-year-old Yulia Kuzmina, a student. “We get a feeling that a war has started.”

That is a worry that extends far beyond Volgograd.

Although there has been no claim of responsibility for the bombing of the city’s main railway station and a trolleybus, suspicion falls strongly on Islamist insurgents, whose leader ordered his adherents this summer to do all they could to derail the Winter Olympics, which start Feb. 7 in the Russian resort city of Sochi.

BE HAPPY

South Coast, NSW, Australia

Be Happy. May all Beings Be Happy. All creatures. We all reached our own rock bottoms and he had reached his several times over. He was sick, but he was not sure what from. And depressed, in a crippled way which helped him dive to to the bottom. All these strange thoughts, which enabled him and destroyed him and which he had never been able to deal with. All was lost; but in the end the only story was the story. And so we worshipped from afar. Old injustices ran around in circles. "Why couldn't they just leave me alone?" But kindness was repaid with theft; and everything came home to roost.

Loss of status, loss of position, loss of purpose. Men felt it in particular, and did not do well. He watched the entire six seasons of The Supranos, lost in another family when his own barely seemed to exist. The children were grown and flown. His parents were in their eighties. He had failed his responsibilities. There were only so many hours he could stare at the wall. Or keep his eyes closed and his head covered. There were symptons of classic depression; but most of all he just needed a home. And he didn't want it to be here. This wasn't his place anymore. Hadn't been his place in years. He hadn't wanted to come back; but one course leads to another, that's all there was.

He was shadowed by ghosts of his own making. He could still hear their voices in the wind. "I told them not to." As in, leave him alone. We've joined the hunt. We're doing their work for them. There's nothing to be gained. He knows nothing, and if he knows anything, he's not stupid enough to tell you. Unless it incriminated those who had done him harm. But the point was, he was not alone. They were preyed on, and he had been preyed upon. And that was it; he had made the mistakes. Now came the recovery phase. Again. As if, just when it was all over, it came back again. He didn't know when it was wearing out. He didn't know what was happening. He hoped for a warm home coming and found the same disparate people; and did not make contact.

His own past, his own demise, kept replaying in a perpetual, tedious loop. Depressed people are not attractive. He wanted to rise up, and could rise up. But these shadows still haunted him; and always would. "He'll regret it for the rest of his life," someone said. As if his life would be short. He circled up the leaves; he gained tolerance; he made as if to arch back to a better time; and then forgot that too. May All Beings Be Happy. May All Beings Be Free. The sayings of the Buddha had become fridge magnets in some parts of the world; but still held power. They would always hold power. He would always be free. There would always be the power of the story; and that, in the end, was all there was. The story.

MALICE AFORETHOUGHT

Australia's Nanny State

In all its forms, in all its wickedness, he slept more than he had ever slept because he was depressed, and sleep was the only escape. If escape into tormented dreams was escape at all. In pristine suburbs and grotty holes, in places where he no longer belonged and did not want to be. Already the world had overlapped several times; he had done his best and should have been free. To murmur into dusks. To entertain past passions. To hear the stalking through the bush; the shriek of cicadas in the summer. "He will regret it the rest of his life." Yes, well that may be. But he would like to have been free of the commentary. 

The cruel past, the distant future, things were running headlong into walls. He remembered Colin as much as he remembered anyone, and transposed their long legs. He wanted to reach down and kiss them, these vaporous forms. "It was a bit of a shock, seeing him naked." Yes, well, as he had said, he could do without the commentary. "Shirt lifter." The changing guards, the changing nature of everything, made as if for relevance but opted out. He was kind when there was no room for kindness. Life was stark when it should have been dismembered. Flyovers and underpasses, traffic that dissembled out along long ribbons. He could have been free. Instead he was trapped.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://rt.com/politics/volgograd-terror-foreign-ministry-993/

The suicide blasts in Volgograd signal that it’s time for international players to stop dividing terrorists into “good” and “bad” ones based on geopolitical agenda, and to unite the globe in a battle against the threat, Russia’s Foreign Ministry stated.

“A strike, cynically planned on the eve of New Year celebrations, is another attempt by the terrorists to open a domestic ‘front,’ spread panic and chaos, cause interfaith strife and conflicts within the Russian society,” the ministry said in a statement.

The two consecutive suicide attacks in the southern Russian city of Volgograd - which killed more than 30 people on Sunday and Monday - will not see Russia retreating in its “tough and consistent battle against the insidious enemy that knows no boundaries and can only be stopped collectively,” the ministry said.

The ministry stressed that the Volgograd blasts were staged using the same template as recent terror attacks in the US, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and other countries.

“The position of some politicians and political strategists, who are still trying to divide terrorists as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ones, depending on current geopolitical aims, is becoming evidently mischievous,” the ministry stressed. “Terrorism is always a crime and the punishment for it must be inevitable.”

AVENGE

From The Daily Telegraph

He had been angry and sad for a very long time; haunted by his ridiculous pursuit, humiliated by his own mistakes. Stories of being robbed, deceived and ridiculed circled in his brain as if they would never stop. Dangerous people, dangerous to know. And all he had achieved was to blow himself up. "He should be thankful to be alive." Yes, well there was that. He was deliberately climbing out of a depression which had hit him, a dark, clammy hand. Someone was always betrayed in the end. He wanted to be quiet now; to get on with things. He had found the surveillance extremely difficult; how much they had ridiculed him, concocted hate. Searching for fun and affection, instead all he had found was ignominy and confusion.

He had to stand up to it. He had to move on. Sometimes he thought they were still threatening to kill him; but they had done their worst and he had done his worst and he just wanted to retreat to the sunny uplands of the spirit, to quote Michael Dransfield. "Let us go then, you and your music and the wind and I, leaving from very strange stations of the Cross, from the uncharted uplands of the spirit." He had collapsed under pressure; a broken man. But from every death a resurrection. Except this time was different. Regret and remorse could pound him forever; the things that had happened. The security he had flung away.

One door shuts and another opens. He was fond of quoting the old cliche. And perhaps he would never have started off with the new project if he had slipped comfortably into retirement. That was where the story came in, became the justification. At least he had given it a go. But he didn't know now where it would lead. Humility. Remorse. If he felt claustrophobic it was easy to understand why. Watched, watched, squirming, his unlovely, aging body. Humiliated as he had been. He wouldn't have wished it on his worst enemy. "And if they had succeeded, if they had killed me, none of them could have cared less," he told a senior editor in a farang bar in Bangkok late one afternoon.

These moments of intimacy, or clairvoyance, seemed impossible without the fluidity of alcohol lifting the wings; although plenty of other people managed it. He had done his sociology thesis on bars and it never once occurred to him that he might have a problem with alcohol. That it made him feel worse, not better. That perhaps the Buddha might have had a point when he declared, "no intoxicants". For all the stifled shouts; difficult to tell now what was real and what concocted; what were natural fluctuations in sound and what were exactly what he wanted to hear, or, all too often, what he was meant to hear. These things had been so haunting, and now he had drifted away. It had all been a terrible accident. He hadn't meant to come to the attention of anybody. He had just wanted respite after all those years of work. 

There had been no respite. "Amazing how miserable you can get trying to have fun," he declared, but the irony was lost.